Interview with Joshua Miller
Thrive for Life and Georgetown University’s Pivot Program and Prisons & Justice Initiative share a similar mission - supporting formerly incarcerated individuals returning home.
Joshua A. Miller is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, a highly selective business school that admits only 16.9 percent of its more than three thousand annual applicants. But if you ask him to tell you about the best students he’s ever taught, Mr. Miller doesn’t talk about his Georgetown undergraduates. Rather, he mentions the incarcerated men and women he taught at a Correctional Institution in Jessup, a medium-security prison in Maryland.
“They’re just the best students I’ve ever had,” reflects Miller, who is now, in addition to his teaching position at Georgetown, also the Director of Education for the Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative and the Managing Director of the Georgetown Pivot Program—both partners of Thrive for Life. “They have insights that I didn’t have, it was not predictable. They’re brilliant and unrecognized talent,” he says.
After graduating from Bard College with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy in 2000, Miller began his career investigating police misconduct in New York City with the Civilian Complaint Review Board. In this position, Miller says, “I got a pretty good sense of the problems with policing.” In 2002, he began a graduate degree program in Philosophy at Penn State University, where he learned about the Bard Prison Initiative through a former faculty advisor who had praised the intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm of incarcerated students. After completing his degree, Miller began working as a professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore but found himself unsatisfied.
“I was not loving it. And, for some reason, what I concluded was that I needed to teach more, but I needed to teach in the Community to people who really wanted to learn,” says Miller. He reached out to a friend who had been teaching incarcerated students at Jessup and was able to get him inside the facility, where he began to teach his own class.
“I got ahold of 30 copies of a book that I’d used in my dissertation, The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt,” says Miller, “and I just came in and we started doing a book group. I know the book very well, it was relatively easy to do, but the students were amazing. And I hate to say it—no, I don’t hate to say it, I’m happy to say it—they’re just the best students I’ve ever had.”
Miller believes that the United States’ incarcerated population represents a “concentrated natural talent” pool of individuals, many of whom are underrepresented due to their race or ethnicity. “I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on [my experiences at Jessup] since then,” Miller says, “and one of the things I’ve realized is, we lock up 2.3 million people in this country. They’re brilliant. They shouldn’t be locked up; they wouldn’t be locked up in any other country. The vast majority of them would have been released long ago, and so you’ve got all these people who would be in college instead of prison in any other country in the world.”
The Georgetown Pivot Program was founded in 2018 to help remedy this issue by providing formerly incarcerated individuals with academic opportunities and supported employment, culminating in a custom certificate in business and entrepreneurship. At the time of its conception, one of the program’s co-founders and fellow Georgetown faculty member, Marc Howard, had been working with Miller in Jessup; naturally, Howard enlisted him for help.
Miller helped Howard and Ms. Pietra Rivoli, another Georgetown faculty member, flesh out the details of the new program. Miller says that they approached the Department of Employment Services in D.C. and the Minority Business Development Agency to secure the necessary funding to get the program up and running: “Between those two sources, we were able to pay fellows an amount of money that goes up to $15 an hour, which is now the minimum wage. That means that we can ask people to give us 40 hours a week for 10 months, which is a really big commitment for somebody who's really on the edge […], especially in a city like DC which is intensely expensive.”
The ultimate goal of the Pivot Program is to provide formerly incarcerated students with the support and resources they need to thrive in non-incarcerated society, says Miller. “Right off the bat, what we were doing [with the Georgetown Pivot Program] was trying to build a safe space for people to return from prison, come home, get the skills they needed and the kind of psychic space they needed to be successful.”
